GLC

Gilles Le Corre was born in 1950 in Nantes, France. A painter since the end of 70s, he is also an engraver and calligrapher. He has been learning about medieval art and old books for as long as he can remember. More recently he has made the computer a tool for writing like the quill pen and ink. With it, he aims to make it possible to print books that look just like old ones! Beginning in 2007 he has been trying to reproduce, very exactly, a wide range of historic European typefaces, mainly from medieval and early periods of printing - his favorite period - from 1456 with Gutenberg, up to 1913 with a font inspired by a real old typewriter.

All his fonts are based on historical research, identifying whenever possible printers and punch cutters, cities and countries, that represent a time and style. Often, they are “eroded”, an aesthetic choice because old printed texts have this rough and imperfect appearance.

The punctuation signs of the time (mainly , ; . : - / | ( ) ' " ? and ! when available) are always respected as they were in contemporary documents. Every font is completed with arabic numbers, accented characters and any missing characters (such as the W and K which were not used in French medieval books or Latin texts, for exemple), plus any others of which no original instance can be found, along with typical ligatures, abbreviated letters, and final or initial characters, like the final “long s” and the initial or median “long s” , and more. They are all described in a render sheet that accompanies each font file.

Gilles Le Corre was born in 1950 in Nantes, France. A painter since the end of 70s, he is also an engraver and calligrapher. He has been learning about medieval art and old books for as long as he can remember. More recently he has made the computer a tool for writing like the quill pen and ink. With it, he aims to make it possible to print books that look just like old ones! Beginning in 2007 he has been trying to reproduce, very exactly, a wide range of historic European typefaces, mainly from medieval and early periods of printing - his favorite period - from 1456 with Gutenberg, up to 1913 with a font inspired by a real old typewriter.